Since 1910, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has inspired curiosity and learning about the natural world and our place in it.

Partnerships

06/30/2015

Iceland. The country’s name might seem to say it all. But in reality, only about 10 percent of this island nation is covered with ice. The other 90 percent encompasses cooled lava flows and cliff-lined fjords, craters and bubbling hot springs, boulder fields and hardy, persistent plant life.

Forged from volcanoes and glaciers, Iceland’s rugged beauty is captivating. Photographer Feodor Pitcairn and geophysicist and poet Ari Trausti Guðmundsson reveal this land of fire and ice in the new exhibition Primordial Landscapes: Iceland Revealed, opening July 2. Primordial Landscapes looks at some of the Earth’s most dramatic geological processes using themes of Fire, Ice, and Transformation.

Iceland is one of the most geologically active places on Earth. Volcanic eruptions and subsurface geothermal activity produce hot springs, geysers, and steam plumes. Arctic ice and snow, rain, and glacial melt combine to form powerful rivers and waterfalls that carve the Earth’s surface. After active lava flows cool, life slowly and persistently begins to take hold. To see the Icelandic landscape is to see many of our planet’s most fundamental processes at work.

This steam plume is found in the highlands of the Torfajökull volcanic system, which contain big, powerful geothermal fields. Geothermal fields are subsurface reservoirs of the Earth’s heat. On the surface, they produce visible hot springs, geysers, and steam plumes. Image by Feo Pitcairn Fine Art.

Photographer Feo Pitcairn first visited Iceland in 2011 and was captivated by its landscapes. On that and on subsequent visits, he captured the 41 images displayed in the exhibition. “With each return to this place at the edge of the Arctic Circle, I became more intimately humbled by nature’s power,” he said. “I have found great inspiration while sojourning with my camera in these wild and varied landscapes.”

A new landscape of lakes, scree (broken rock) slopes, hills, and large boulders is revealed after a glacier retreats. Soon vegetation settles in, and the land is scattered with hardy flowers, grass, moss, and lichen. Glaciers in Iceland—and throughout the Arctic—are vanishing due to a rapidly warming climate. Image by Feo Pitcairn Fine Art.

In addition to the photography, Primordial Landscapes: Iceland Revealed also features poetry by geophysicist and writer Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, translated from the original Icelandic. Excerpts are printed large scale on the exhibition gallery walls, and a soundscape of Guðmundsson reciting his work in Icelandic is paired with English translations projected onto the walls. The exhibit’s soundscape also includes wind, cracking ice, geysers, and other environmental sounds recorded in Iceland. In addition, visitors can get a close-up view of volcanic rock samples and see several examples of Iceland’s extremely hardy plant life from the NMNH Botany Department’s collection.

NMNH lighting specialist Virginia Croskey created an immersive lighting display for the exhibition to allow visitors to experience a taste of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. After failing to catch a glimpse of the northern lights on a trip to Norway, Croskey saw them earlier this year while visiting Iceland.

“I wanted to show the serenity and magic,” she said. “It’s there—and then it’s not—and it’s back, in a different shape—over there.”

The aurora borealis, or “northern lights,” come from the Earth’s magnetic field being continuously hit by electrically charged particles from the Sun. They are transported toward the magnetic poles, where they collide with nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere. These molecules absorb the energy and then release it as visible light. Image by Feo Pitcairn Fine Art.

Primordial Landscapes: Iceland Revealed parallels the United States’ 2015-2017 chairmanship of the Arctic Council, the governing body responsible for coordinating policy affecting Arctic nations and indigenous peoples living within the Arctic Circle. The Museum will be celebrating the U.S. chairmanship with public programming and research symposia directed by the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center.

By Laura Donnelly-Smith, Exhibits Writer/Editor, National Museum of Natural History

06/29/2015

Welcome to Part II of our conversation with Antoine Bercovici, a Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Paleobiology, who is using fossil pollen to solve a paleontological mystery about the K/Pg extinction. We left off with Antoine telling us about a strange site in North Dakota (read Part 1 here), where they found Cretaceous pollen in rocks above where they thought the K/Pg boundary should be.

This is where I started to get into palynology (the study of plant pollen and spores) - to try to solve this problem and better understand what was going on. While still an undergraduate, I started training myself by looking at samples, working with the paleontologist who did the first analysis, the late Doug Nichols from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I quickly started to realize something - the usual way that biostratigraphy works is on presence and absence, and that wasn’t going to be good enough here.

For example, usually, if a certain type of pollen from a certain type of plant is found, whether it’s one single grain or a thousand grains, it means that type of plant was present – we don’t typically look any deeper. The key at this strange North Dakota site was to look at this in a different way, from an ecological perspective, using relative abundance (how much is there, rather than just if something is there or not).

Looking at the Cretaceous pollen taxa in our samples, we had about 20-30% abundance and then, at the boundary, it dropped down to almost zero - but not all the way to zero, which was an important point. There was still a very small number of pollen taxa present after what we thought was the boundary. This made us realize that, in this particular case, we couldn’t necessarily count solely on traditional biostratigraphy as the tool that would help us put our finger on the boundary, because Cretaceous pollen does exist after the boundary.

This is because the K/Pg extinction wasn’t just a single event that wiped everything out at once, and these rocks showed how it happened in stages?

Yes. So the asteroid was the trigger for all the catastrophe that caused the extinction approximately 66 million years ago. Obviously the asteroid killed animals and plants locally – having that drop on your head would not be good! But it was not the only extinction mechanism. It triggered all sorts of disasters, like tsunamis, climate change, massive cooling, darkness that stopped photosynthesis, etc. None of these were as instantaneous as the impact was, so some organisms might have survived for a short period of time.

However, geologically, it was still a very fast process that took maybe months to decades. This is a timeline that you can see at the small resolution of pollen in the rock record, millimeter by millimeter. We realize that what was potentially happening with the pollen at our site was that we were seeing this record of plants that survived the trigger event, but then eventually got replaced by competition and all the environmental changes.

What you may also have is reworking, which means something excavated older sediments and then they got included in more modern ones. For instance, in France, there is a very famous deposit where you have trilobites in a Tertiary formation, which is strange because trilobites are Paleozoic (meaning they lived much earlier). What probably happened is that these trilobites were part of a Tertiary river system that eroded Paleozoic rock, so they were excavated naturally by the river and then reincorporated into the Tertiary sandstone.

A lycopodium spore from the Hell Creek Formation (66 million years old) viewed under a microscope, adjusting the focus back and forth.

So reworking might have occurred with the pollen at your site?

Yes, this can happen with pollen as well, because it’s very small. Think about it – you have all these Cretaceous rocks that are being eroded by Paleocene river systems and Cretaceous pollen grains being reincorporated into newer rocks in small amounts. This could be an explanation for the persistence of those pollen grains for a short period of time, since the Cretaceous isn’t that far away from the Paleocene - it’s just past the boundary, so you can easily excavate those rocks and reincorporate material. There are also so-called "Tertiary dinosaurs" that have been found the same way, in big river systems where those bones have been re-excavated by erosion and then reincorporated. That’s why there have been claims of Tertiary dinosaurs, but that isn’t the case – they’ve been reworked. We think the same thing happened with pollen on a smaller scale.

Further studies on other sites in North Dakota showed that this anomaly was the rule, rather than exception. My findings of using relative abundance data give us a much more precise positioning of the K/Pg boundary. This is especially important because understanding the mass extinction relies on the capability of pinpointing precisely the position of the K/Pg boundary. This gives us a precise timeline that we can use to compare flora and fauna from below and above, without any mixing.

02/04/2015

When Charley Potter opened up a large box marked “Alaska Seafood: Keep Frozen” at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center, he wasn’t sure what to expect inside. Underneath layers of packing material was the cleaned skull of a beaked whale, carefully wrapped and sent to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) by the Aleut people that live on St. George Island, Alaska. Two of them, Hertha Kashaverof and Josh Prokopiof, investigated the whale’s massive body beached along the coast of their remote island earlier this summer.

A beaked whale breaching in the icy waters off of Antarctica. Image by Soler97, Wikimedia CC-by-NC-SA.

After DNA samples were collected and measurements taken, the skull was submerged for cleaning in the Bering Sea. A few months later, the St. George Tribal Government’s biology crew recovered the skull and shipped it to Potter and his team for scientific analysis with the hopes of solving an ongoing mystery about beaked whales.

Charley Potter and Nikki Vollmer, NOAA Fisheries National Research Council post-doctoral fellow at NMNH, carefully unpack the beaked whale skull at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD. Photo by Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian.

Beaked whales are kind of extreme. With their elongated faces, some of them look more like dolphins than whales, but all species are known for their impressive diving abilities. Scientists have recorded beaked whales 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, holding their breaths far longer than most other species- more than two hours at a time! They speculate that the whales primarily live in an underwater abyss, searching for other deep divers, like squid, to eat. This reclusive lifestyle makes beaked whales difficult to study, and little is known about their behaviors and life history.

Aside from their diving habits, beaked whales are known for their unusual dentition. Males have 1-2 pairs of teeth that protrude from their bottom jaws, kind of like boar tusks. In the marine world, this trait is unique to beaked whale species. Females may rely on the appearance of these teeth to find the right species of male during mating season.

Left: A tell-tale sign of a beaked whale: two tusks protruding from the lower jaw. Photo Credit: Smithsonian Institution. Right: Charley Potter and Nikki Vollmer hold the tusks of two Baird’s Beaked Whale specimens. The new skull representing the black species is on the right, and the gray species is on the left. Photo by Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian.

Smithsonian collections manager Charley Potter and emeritus curator Jim Mead have been studying beaked whales for decades. One species, known as Baird’s Beaked Whale (Berardius bairdii), has long been thought to exist in two shades: black and gray. However, new DNA research studies suggest that these color variations might actually represent different species! Potter and Mead are part of a team of scientists from NMNH, the National Marine Fisheries Service and National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan looking for clues to support this hypothesis.

In addition to genetic studies, the research team is relying on beaked whale specimens in museum collections to do morphological comparisons between the gray and black populations. The gray species is noticeably larger and found in the North Pacific and southern Bering Sea. The black species has primarily been found in pacific waters near northern Japan, although the new skull was located in Alaskan waters. With only a handful of examples of Baird’s Beaked Whale available in museums around the world, the skull from the Aleut people adds another piece to the puzzle that will help scientists better understand Baird’s Beaked Whales and how to protect them.

Charley Potter examines the skull of the black Baird’s Beaked Whale skull, which was shipped to the NMNH by the Aleut people of St. George Island, Alaska. The skull was so well packed that bits of ice remained on the surface. Photo by Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian.

After examining the skull in person, Potter determined that it was likely from an older male belonging to the black subset of Baird’s Beaked Whale. It will temporarily join one other black specimen in NMNH’s collections, which was also obtained from Alaska in 1948.

By Kathryn Sabella, Press Officer at the National Museum of Natural History

NMNH would like to extend a special thanks to the Aleut leaders and members of the St. George Island community who recovered and sent the beaked whale skull to the Smithsonian for scientific study. Thanks also to Professor Kate Wynne, University of Alaska SeaGrant Marine Mammal Expert with the University of Alaska Fairbanks for coordinating logistics and networking communications about this specimen.

09/11/2012

The genus Hippocampus
is made up of nearly 50 species of distinctive marine fish commonly
known as the seahorses. They are found worldwide in protected, shallow
tropical and temperate waters, especially estuaries, mangrove swamps,
coral reefs, and eel grass beds. Seahorses do not have scales, instead
have bony plates for protection, and swim slowly in an upright posture.
They spend much of their time stationary, using their tails to attach
themselves to corals or grasses.

Seahorses are well-known for their paternal care. After several days of courting, the female seahorse deposits somewhere between a dozen and a thousand eggs into the male's egg pouch. The male then incubates the eggs for 1 to 6 weeks, depending on the species. Like almost all other fish species, seahorses do not nurture their young after birth.

3. Maned Seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus). The color of the maned seahorse ranges from greenish-yellow to reddish brown, often mimicking the hues of the surrounding environment, providing this small fish with valuable camouflage.

5. Thorny Seahorse (Hippocampus histrix). This seahorse has independently-moving eyes, which enables it to scan the surrounding water for potential prey and only adds to this animal's bizarre appearance.

08/27/2012

In the Sant Ocean Hall. Image courtesy of Jacqueline Schipani.

By Samantha Schipani, Winter and Summer Intern, Education & Outreach and Encyclopedia of Life

Where are you from and what brings you to the Museum?

I hail from the far-off land of Northern Virginia, but I attend college at Columbia University in New York City. I've wanted to intern at the National Museum of Natural History ever since I was a kid, roaming the hallowed halls with my parents during our weekend trips to the city. I believe my exact words were, I want to own this place so I can ride all the dinosaurs and wear the Hope Diamond, but I think that translates more or less to, "Gee, I think the Smithsonian would be a great place to work!" Presently, the kind of work the Smithsonian does, specifically in the Office of Education and Outreach and Encyclopedia of Life where I have interned, perfectly marries my passion for science and knack for business and communications (I'm currently a Neuroscience and Behavior major with a Business Management concentration).

How did you get "Behind those Doors?"

I was talking with a friend of mine two winters ago while still slaving away on my college applications and heard great things about NMNH. He had just finished his first semester at the College of William and Mary and was a winter intern in 2011. Hearing him describe the incredible research and public outreach work he was doing there showed me the light at the end of the tunnel. I was excited about the potential for awesome experiences that I could have mere months after beginning college if only I finished those grueling applications. We kept in touch, and the next year he led me to the site where I could apply.

After emailing various project managers whose research coincided with my interests, I heard back from Catherine Sutera, an ocean science educator in the Office of Education and Outreach who was focusing on public programs for the Sant Ocean Hall. From there, we discussed hours, duties, and paperwork - pretty soon, I was a full-fledged Smithsonian intern!

This summer, I emailed Catherine again after I finished working for a middle school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) camp, eager to help out for the remaining month I had before heading back to college. While Catherine had already taken on another intern for the summer, she put me in contact with Breen Byrnes at the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) who just happened to have some outreach projects for me to tackle. Within a few weeks, I was back at the National Museum of Natural History!

What is it you're doing back there, behind those doors?

Over the winter season, I started by reorganizing the master spreadsheet of specimens in the Sant Ocean Hall. The Sant Ocean Hall is the largest exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History and has about 700 specimens and artifacts on display. Needless to say, it was quite a task. Over the course of my internship, I had the rare privilege of getting to explore the Hall before regular museum hours and becoming personally acquainted with each and every object in the exhibition. The experience was really incredible.

After I finished working on the spreadsheet, I made a collection for the Sant Ocean Hall on EOL, a comprehensive online encyclopedia of all the living flora and fauna on the planet. The EOL Collection tool lets you gather content, like images, articles, or maps that are on EOL, into a virtual collection you can name, annotate and share. The Sant Ocean Hall collection is convenient for an online user who is curious to see all the different species featured in the Sant Ocean Hall or a museum-goer who wants to learn more about a specific trilobite hanging on the wall. I quickly became adept at using EOL tools and am quite proud of the finished product.

Excited about working with Encyclopedia of Life. Image courtesy of Samantha Schipani.

What's been the most amazing or unexpected thing you've seen, experienced or discovered while being part of the NMNH academic community?

The passion of the employees at NMNH never ceases to amaze me. These are people who truly care about the work they are doing, whether it is science research or public outreach. They are also incredibly creative in ways that just blow me away. I had assumed that a certain level of sophisticated creativity was required to run such an amazing, unique institution, but I've even found it in the most unexpected places! Katja Schulz of Encyclopedia of Life, who works two desks down from me this summer, makes the most hilarious, wonderful collections on EOL - they are absolutely worth exploring. Here are some of my favorite collections: Cute!, Genera Named after Greek Mythological Figures, and Species with Funny English Names.

Furthermore, everyone I've met has demonstrated an amazing sense of curiosity for all the work that's happening at the museum. Not only have I had the opportunity to go on tours that are completely unrelated to the departments I've worked in (I especially loved the Cullman Library Rare Book Collection tour), but both of my mentors have gone out of their way to show me exhibits and labs that are particularly cool. Catherine and I went to a feeding at the O. Orkin Insect Zoo (freaky, but awesome!) and Breen and I have talked about exploring the high-resolution photo lab across the hall from our office. It really is an incredible place to work because there is always something amazing happening.

Where do you go to find information about species? Perhaps you head to the library to check out some books, but more than likely, you go online. The world has transformed the way it finds and consumes scientific information. Just a few years ago, access to knowledge about the world’s 1.9 million species of plants, animals and microorgansisms on one free, trusted website might have seemed impossible, but now the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL; eol.org) is quickly making that dream a reality.

How can one organization possibly catalog life on Earth? By harnessing the collective energy of scientists, students, and people like you! EOL relies on a consortium of over 200 content partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, and more than 50,000 users around the world to compile information on every species. Since its beginnings in 2007, EOL has expanded from 30,000 to more than one million pages.

Technology plays a very important role in getting all the species information to the right place in EOL. Every day, EOL computers gather up information about living creatures that is stored in databases all over the world. These databases belong to our EOL Content Partners, without whom EOL could not exist. These same EOL computers then organize this information by the names of those living creatures. For example, even though EOL gets information about wolves from many sources, it is all organized together in one place to make it easy for you to find (search for “wolf” and see for yourself).

As new content flows into EOL, it is reviewed by experts called “curators” who help maintain EOL’s high-quality information. We also make all of our information freely available for re-use under a Creative Commons license. EOL is a collaborative initiative, and we invite people like you to come to the EOL website to learn about living nature, leave comments, create EOL Collections, participate in EOL Communities, or share your expertise by writing articles, reviewing content, or by becoming an EOL Content Partners.

As EOL grows, we are expanding to become a global community of collaborators serving the general public, enthusiastic amateurs, educators, students and professional scientists from around the world. But we can’t do it alone and we need you to join in this international effort to catalogue biodiversity. We have millions of visitors each year - are you one of them?

Let’s get started! Here are some easy and fun ways to explore EOL and help us build our collective understanding of life on Earth -

04/26/2012

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) recently served up an interesting challenge for local students—design mobile education “carts” for our new state-of-the-art Education Center, currently under construction here at NMNH.

The students, part of the National Building Museum’s Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP), are involved in a seven-week course in which students learn about design by designing and planning a product and then building it. For the last 11 years, the program has been giving middle and high school teens a chance to learn about designing, building, working as a team, and working for a client.

To be successful in their building design, the students learned about what kind of work is conducted at the National Museum of Natural History. DAP students met with scientists, educators, volunteers, and exhibits staff from the museum to learn about how and what NMNH scientists study, how science information is conveyed, and how the museum uses carts to give visitors an up-close view of objects and conduct demonstrations.

Supporting the program’s core values of teamwork, research, and peer communication, the DAP students met with NMNH’s Youth Advisory Board (YAB). YAB, a group of local teens working with NMNH to develop new ways to communicate science to their peers, provided the DAP students a perspective from other teens on what happens at NMNH and gave them an opportunity to exchange ideas.

Exposing the students to both museums has played a real role in helping students understand the intersection between design and science. “Design and science are interconnected. Design is all about how people perceive something, to the point that it really is a science…” said Vangie Hakes, a DAP teen.

“And in science, design is really apparent. Everything in the universe, whether it's natural or man-made, is designed in a certain way, to serve a certain purpose. The way a thing works is based on its design.”

Since NMNH is in the midst of building its new education center, the design project has been very timely. The new education center will be a 10,000-square-foot space designed for students, families, teachers, and life-long learners to get up-close to the science behind the science at the National Museum of Natural History. Visitors will be able to handle and learn about 20,000 collection objects, attend lectures and events in a new theatre, and participate in activities in the classroom.

The new space will house activities focused on thousands of collection objects, education programs, and public programs that are designed to be happening simultaneously. The complexity of the Education Center space and program design is an important project component for the students to better understand how their education cart design will fit into the bigger picture.

Stepping up to the design challenge, DAP students understood that integration of the Education Center design was critical in creating a successful product. “This program teaches us how to listen to other ideas, patience, and compromise. At DAP I learned more cooperation skills and mixing skills meaning taking my ideas and the ideas of others, mixing them together to make one big design,” observed DAP student Taylor Hicks.

The collaborative effort between the two museums and their youth programs not only taught the students about design and building, but it also helped the students understand the value of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

“Working with the actual client and meeting their needs really helps see what would happen in the real world because you have certain specifications you need to meet and if you don’t, they won’t be satisfied,” says DAP student Sumaiyah Liggans.

The collaboration between the National Building Museum and the National Museum of Natural History has been a successful pilot project. The DAP students are continuing to learn about design and building, while serving real community needs. Students from each of the Museum’s teen programs are also learning how transferrable their new skills are between the building and science disciplines.

On Saturday, April 28, 2012, from 1-3 pm, the National Building Museum will host a reception where the teens will present their prototypes. The event is free and open to the public, with refreshments after the presentations are complete. Come out to the National Building Museum to help these students celebrate their accomplishments.

Information about the Images: Design Apprenticeship Program students work as a team to design and build mobile education “carts” for the National Museum of Natural History’s new Education Center. The students worked closely with National Museum of Natural History staff to understand how the mobile education “carts” would be used, to better inform their design and prototype, seen here being built. All images courtesy of the National Building Museum.

04/24/2012

The 2011 Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibit opened at the Natural History Museum on March 30, 2012. We all know that photography is a strikingly compelling means of experiencing nature's majesty. This concept is the driving force behind the Nature's Best Photography competition, which operates under the mission to "celebrate the beauty and diversity of nature through the art of photography." The Museums's exhibit features the winners in each award category, as well as a collection of some of the highly honored photographs submitted to the competition this year.

Last month, we featured a post highlighting the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium digital library project (of which the Smithsonian is a founding member) providing free access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature. The online library features not only texts but also stunning illustrations of natural history from the past 500 years. Not surprisingly, the species featured in the award-winning photographs from the Nature's Best Exhibit can also be found in the historic books held in the BHL collection. To celebrate the exhibit, we're highlighting some of the featured photographs and sharing more about the species captured in each snapshot through illustrations and scientific descriptions found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. You can also learn more about the species starring in the exhibit by visiting the Encyclopedia of Life.

Constantine John Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave, was the first to describe the polar bear, which he encountered during his 1773 expedition to the North Pole. He published the account in the 1774 publication A Voyage Towards the North Pole. Just four years later, the first published illustration of the bear was released in Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur (below).

The lion was first described by Carl Linnaeus, a famous Swedish botanist and zoologist who developed the schema of identifying organisms by genus and species names ñ a system known as binomial nomenclature. He is therefore referred to as the Father of Modern Taxonomy. The tenth edition of his revolutionary work, Systema Naturae, represents the birth of zoological nomenclature (using binomial nomenclature for animals). The Lion was scientifically described for the first time in this work.

In 1909, Frank Finn's work Wild Beasts of the World was published, containing 100 reproduced illustrations of nature drawings by Louis Sargent, Cuthbert E. Swan, and Winifred Austin. One of the drawings contained within the first volume was "Lion and Lioness," by Louis Sargent (above).

The Stag Beetle was also first described by Carl Linnaeus in his tenth edition of Systema Naturae. The beetle's common name comes from the resemblance of the speciesí large mandibles to a deer's antlers. Furthermore, male deer use their antlers when battling over territory and mates. The Stag Beetle uses its mandibles for the same purposes.

In 1792, Edward Donovan, an Anglo-Irish writer, illustrator and amateur zoologist, published the first volume of his sixteen volume work entitled The Natural History of British Insects. The series, published over a period of twenty-one years, contained 576 plates, 568 of which were colored. His depiction of the Stag Beetle, wings extended in flight, is particularly memorable (above).

04/10/2012

Field books are the original records of scientific research and discovery. Typical field books might include scientific data on species, habitats, and environments. They can also take the form of journals and diaries which provide a more personal perspective on field work including accounts of travels, people encountered, and daily events. Some of my personal favorites are ones that talk about the food that was eaten during these travels, some of which even go into detail notes on the ingredients or preparation of local cuisines.

At the Smithsonian, there are more than 6,000 field books covering two centuries of biodiversity field work. Representing the work of historic expeditions, well-known scientists and key moments in the history of biological research, many of these are inextricably linked to field books in other collections across the country. Take the United States Exploring Expedition or Wilkes Expedition as it’s commonly called. With field books from that single expedition now housed at more than a dozen institutions across the country and many not yet available online, finding them all can be a laborious task indeed.

To help improve access to these types of materials, the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) came together to form the Field Book Project. Working together with six other leading natural history organizations, the Field Book Project is developing a Field Book Registry which will make it possible to search and locate field book content through one online location.

02/23/2012

New illustration of the sexual system of Carolus von Linnaeus :and the temple of Flora, or garden of nature (1807), Nymphaea nelumbo, Sacred Egyptian Bean. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/307094.

An Entomologist writing a book on skipper butterflies needs to verify several citations and species names. The information he needs to do so is held within a natural history library not accessible to him. A team of malacologists is attempting to catalog the entire family of Pyramidellidae, but after fifty years has still barely scratched the surface as they are unable to identify and obtain the necessary literature. A botanist in an isolated African village has no access to the literature needed to complete his research project on local flora. Just ten years ago, without access to the necessary literature, the individuals in each of these scenarios would have been unable to complete their work. Today, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has changed that reality.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of 14 natural history and botanical libraries (including the Smithsonian Institution) that collaborate to digitize past and present biodiversity literature, all of which is made freely available to the public. On BHL, you can find over 37.8 million pages of digitized literature (representing over 53,000 titles and 102,000 volumes), going back as far as 1484 and continuing to present day. Not only can you browse millions of pages online, but you can download PDFs and high resolution images of that material. You can also search for literature about a specific species and navigate back to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) for more information on the organism.

You can learn more about BHL, discover fun biodiversity facts, participate in daily quizzes, and explore thousands of free biodiversity images through BHL's social media outlets, including our Blog, Twitter and Facebook. Be sure to check out BHL's Flickr account, which includes more than 23,000 natural history and botanical illustrations from the past 400 years, many of which are extremely rare and incredibly valuable. This growing collection of images from BHL books (several of which are featured in this post) is freely available for download and reuse. Finally, you can download select BHL content directly to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch though the Biodiversity Heritage Library on iTunes U. Again, all content is completely free.

Today, earth's biodiversity faces many challenges, and it is vital that the critical knowledge held within legacy literature be made available to scientists, researchers, conservationists, and the public at large so that we can make intelligent decisions to save global biodiversity for generations to come. Projects like BHL, which provide free global access to digitized versions of this literature, repatriate information about the earth's species to all parts of the world, helping everyone obtain the information needed to protect and preserve life on Earth.